Allen suggests changes while SEC is in listening mode

If you like the 2012 setup in Southeastern Conference football, don't get too comfortable.

If you hate it, better (or at least different) days are likely on the horizon.

The newly expanded SEC has some major issues to sort out with the additions of Texas A&M and Missouri.

That's helped spur University of South Carolina board of trustee member Chuck Allen to express an interesting change to athletic director Eric Hyman.

In an official letter sent from Allen to Hyman on Wednesday, Allen proposed an amendment to the SEC rules: "For the purposes of football division rankings, intra-division games shall be valued as a whole (1.0) game and inter-divisional games shall be valued as a half (0.5) game."

Allen's hope for change stems somewhat from what occurred this past season, when the league was still at 12 teams.

South Carolina finished 6-2 in the league while winning all of its SEC East games, including a victory at Georgia, but the Bulldogs won the right to represent the division in the conference championship game because they were 7-1. USC was the only team to have one of the SEC West's big three opponents (Arkansas) on the schedule. In the regular season, UGA avoided the Razorbacks as well as LSU and Alabama, which played for the BCS title earlier this month.

With expansion, teams are adding a divisional game, leaving only two non-division foes to face and changing the shape of the league.

In 2012, USC gets powerhouses LSU and Arkansas while Georgia plays Ole Miss and Auburn, something Allen called the "luck of the draw."

"This (proposal) takes the randomness out of the non-divisional schedule," Allen said Wednesday. "It doesn't eliminate it, but it does reduce it. It just seems fair that the team that won all its division games would be the division champ."

Right now in the SEC, anything and everything is possible, from changing how and which teams from the opposite division rotate on the schedule to who is the constant from the other side to opening up St. Louis and Kansas City to hosting SEC championship basketball tournaments.

It's kind of like Manifest Destiny, when America got to write its future out on paper.

The 2012 schedule was pretty much thrown together with a promise to league members that all ideas would be on the table moving forward. That's why Allen is presenting this idea now.

He said Hyman plans on taking Allen's proposal to the next SEC meeting.

"When I talked to him his response to me was that he never contemplated it and so he said, ‘Yes, it sounds like a good idea. If you'll put it in writing, I'll use it as a vehicle and take it to the conference meeting and we'll introduce the proposal, argue for it and see what we can do,'" Allen said.

Not much is clear right now on anything that will be implemented. Word is there are only a pair of issues not up for discussion: playing nine SEC games and shaking up the divisions.

That means Allen has hope.

He, along with the rest of us, now just have to trust in good, old-fashioned bureaucracy to make everything work out.